A memoir of growing up amid poverty in contemporary urban China—at once lyrical and brutal. It is 1980 and Hong Ying has turned 18. China is only now hesitantly beginning to move from under the powerful and dreadful shadow of the now dead Mao Zedong. Hong Ying is only now hesitantly beginning to reach adulthood, exploring her own mind, her sexuality, her past. Born in the famine year of 1962, Hong Ying’s determined to uncover the secrets that lie beneath the surface of her family, to understand why she feels like an outsider in their midst. At the same time she becomes involved with a history teacher at her high school who has his own shadowy and violent past that will soon lead him to a tragic end. He emboldens her to think for herself and also briefly becomes her lover. Throughout it all, the lives of Hong Ying and those around her are hopelessly enmeshed in the capricious and catastrophic policies of the Chinese Communist Party. The famine years of the early “60s, brought on by inept government policies, led her mother, Hong Ying learns, to make choices she would not otherwise have made. The factious struggles of the Cultural Revolution led the history teacher to commit acts of brutality very much against his nature. This is, then, the story of one person’s awakening, but also of a society’s. In its stark and detailed portrayal of unremitting poverty—the pervasive sense of hopelessness and casual violence—and of the stress and intimacies of family life, the work is reminiscent of Angela’s Ashes. Yet it is also very much a part of the great realist writing tradition of China’s “May 4th” movement of the 1930s (Lu Xun, Lao She, etc.) in which the greater tragedies of society are revealed in the ruined lives of a few characters. A major writer emerges here, combining flawlessly the often broken dreams of youth and the usually broken dream of politics. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1637-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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